iStep

"Innovative classrooms are not defined by fixed places but by their spirit of curiosity and collaboration among the learners." Unknown

After some ten years on the merry-go-round of teaching I found myself feeling less enthusiastic. I wanted more depth in our approach to student learning, involvement with the textual material, more discussion, and more engagement from the students. I felt that my own teaching could become dangerously disengaged. To make a long story short, after so many years of teaching, I have somehow come up with the brass ring. I was asked to join with Krista Carter, M.Ed., and work toward moving Colby Community College into the 21st century of learning by studying, researching and incorporating Instructional Technology into our curriculum and making it a part of our culture. iStep was created, the Delta Star Academy would soon follow.

iStep Technical Director,
Colby Community College
2007-2011.

Collaborates with the iStep Academic Director to lead the development and delivery of iStep programs through continuous enhancement of faculty and staff performance with the Learning Management Ssystem and the iStep pedagogy. Mike assesses performance improvements and training solutions to ensure that services to the campus are sustained, consistent, and strong.

iStep

Communicate ♦ Innovate ♦ Integrate ♦ Collaborate

Technology has become a major part of our lives in this 21st Century. Students live in a society that is continuously becoming more complex. The amount of information students and adults need to process grows daily. Gone are the days when being able to program a VCR was all the technology a person would have to master. Jobs are constantly changing requiring workers to regularly learn new skills just to stay employed. To thrive in today's world students need to be prepared to live in a technological society and be able to use a variety of technologies.

The Accreditation criterion of the Higher Learning Commission establishes standards developed to prepare students for this complex society. The “Teaching and Learning” criterions address technology as one of the necessary skills for students' success in the classroom, in the workplace and in the community. Appropriate use of technology is an important element of the Accreditation Standards.

Our primary instructional technology platform is the Learning Management System. iStep is a Program of instruction and learning methodology conceived and developed by Colby Community College faculty. iStep stands for instructing Students with technology for educational progress. The S is capitalized to emphasize our focus on students and their needs and our commitment to the requirements of the HLC Standards. iStep is not simply moving course content to the Internet, nor is it moving the classroom to the Internet (online classes), it’s moving the Internet and associated mediated technology to the classroom.

Through our collaborations of 21st Century Learning and Skills we have developed a framework and vision for 21st Century students that promotes the higher level of learning necessary to succeed in work and life in the 21st century. iStep pedagogy empowers the Colby Community College learning community through its multiple components that go beyond course structure and the delivery platform, by mixing performing and literary arts with instructional technology and digital media. The iStep pedagogy provides a new array of tools and practices that can add value to both traditional and mediated learning settings. Issues like increased enrollments, diverse learning styles, creativity and scheduling flexibility are at the heart of the iStep Program.

Our goal is to use existing and emergent technologies, coupled with quality instruction, to provide all members of our learning community with timely, efficient, and effective resources to help promote increased student achievement through the use of mediated technology. It is our responsibility to guide mediated technology integration and related policy, instructional resource decision-making, and implementation. The working iStep groups are responsible for providing feedback and making recommendations regarding technology-related instructional issues.

We are dedicated to the premise that:

Technology must be easily and readily accessible to all.

There must be effective use and integration of technology in instruction.

Professional development must meet staff needs.

Appropriate technology use must enhance student learning at all levels.

Effective use of technologies requires on-going monitoring and assessing of all aspects of the “program/plan”.

Technology must ease organizational duties and enhance communication in order to support teaching and learning.

We believe in the transformative power of mediated technology in education, which is an integral part of our mission to provide leadership and service to improve teaching and learning by advancing the effective use of instructional technology at Colby College. We welcome support and appreciate the effort of others toward the success of this reformation movement.

Traditional/iStep Pedagogy: What's the Same?

Teaching well on the LMS involves the same set of skills required for teaching well in a traditional classroom. As Lawrence Ragan has written, "Good Teaching is Good Teaching" regardless of where the teaching takes place.

Overall, Ragan's article suggests that the following conditions should be met in any effective teaching/learning exchange:

Learning goals should be clear, and clearly related to specific learning activities and methods of assessment.

There must be ample social interaction between instructor and learners, and among learners.

Activities should be designed to meet the needs of a variety of learners (technical, intellectual, social, pedagogical needs).

Learners and instructors need reliable support and regular feedback.

How well do your current classes meet these conditions?

In general, sound pedagogy is independent of medium, teaching effectively with iStep pedagogy does require some adjustments.

What's Different?

What are some of the important differences between the traditional and blended or accelerated classrooms, and how will these impact your teaching?

Traditional classroom

Blended or Accelerated classroom

Primarily oral transmission of ideas

Primarily visual transmission of ideas

Group setting, face to face

Individual engagement, virtual community

Access limited to specific time frames

24/7 access (unless the server goes down!)

Instructor is often a "sage on the stage"

Instructor is often a "guide on the side"

Linear presentation of material, controlled by instructor

Navigation sequence determined by student

These distinctions are oversimplified, given the range of teaching practice in either environment. Yet it is crucial to remember that Web-based learning is more visual, more solitary, less constrained by time, and in some ways more student-centered than traditional learning environments. Each of these factors must enter into your pedagogical approach when designing and delivering blended and accelerated course materials.

During a lecture, you try to cover a specific amount of material within a given time, but will there also be time for students' questions about the material?

Do administrative duties take up too much of your class time?

How can you help students with weak backgrounds, without boring the more advanced students?

If students cannot attend your lecture, will they be lost unless you offer 1-on-1 tutorials?

Is a 50-minute "talking head" lecture really the best use of your or your students' time?

Use of the Web can help you juggle your different roles as an instructor. Delivering some of your lecture material on the LMS might free up valuable class time for more interactive exchange with students. Axio discussion boards, chat room, live interactive mediated classroom and gradebooks can be used to manage class administration outside of regular class meeting times. Students who require extra help can be linked to self-paced tutorial resources online. Your options are many: you just have to decide how best to use the LMS medium to achieve your teaching goals and your students' learning needs.

Which aspects of your teaching are best delivered in person?What can you offer on the LMS, so that face-to-face time is used efficiently?

The iStep pedagogy focuses on quality of instruction, with technology merely serving as a supplemental tool. In the past the available technology dictated which options were available to Colby College faculty in educating our students. iStep is intended to reverse this dominance by including a strand of work on pedagogy, along side work developing new technical tools and frameworks for our faculty. As iStep develops, the projects undertaken in the technology and pedagogy strands will work closely together to ensure that practice and pedagogy inform the Learning Management System and our use of other emerging educational technology and vice versa. In order to achieve this, it is necessary that we find a common language and use it, not only among ourselves, but in common with external resources so that we can best express our needs to Administration, Learning systems developers and our peers in the e-learning community.
Of the overarching aims of iStep, two relate directly to the educational technology and pedagogy strand;

to provide the College community with accurate, up-to date evidence and research based information about effective practice in the use of educational technology tools and learning.

to promote the application and development of Colby College's educational technology, learning tools and educational technology standards to better support effective practices.

The potential benefit of this approach for Colby College faculty is that we can analyze and reflect on our instructional practices from a theoretical point of view. This should allow our faculty to make more informed decisions between comparable approaches. Furthermore, our faculty will be able to search case studies to find examples of teaching practice that adopt similar approaches.